L. A. Outlaws

by T. Jefferson Parker

Hood thought there was truth in that. “When I look at my father, he’s losing his mind.”

  “And you see yourself someday,” said Madeline.

  “Yes.”

  “The old become infants.”

  “I like your daughter very much.”

  “You’ve captivated her.”

  “Why did you bring me here?”

  “To see if you’re the one,” said Madeline.

  “The one who what?”

  “Who sees my daughter as she really is.”

  “Am I?”

  “I have no evidence of that.”

  Hood said nothing for a moment, just looked out at the flat land and the power lines drooping north. A high school buddy had crashed his new motorcycle into a power pole at over a hundred miles an hour. He was a heck of a bull rider and a wrestler, too.

  “I have something to show you,” said Hood.

  He pulled the DVD from the pocket of his sport coat and held it up to her.

  “Unfortunately, this television needs repair,” she said. “I have a small one in my bedroom. I’ll bring it out.”

  Madeline left the room. Hood stood and went to the window and looked out at the desert. There was a breeze now, and he could feel a hint of its heat coming through the glass. He looked at the book titles. At eye level there were hardcover histories and commentaries on world cinema and television, entertainment biographies and non-fiction, most in excellent condition, all neatly arranged and alphabetized by title. The bottom shelves were stuffed with paperback bodice rippers, westerns and thrillers bloated by use and haphazardly arranged.

  He studied a poster for the Mexican soap opera star-ring Madeline Mercedes. The show was called Nosotros, and the poster was dated 1971. There were similar posters for ’72, ’73 and ’74. Hood touched the dusty poster glass.

  He wandered into the breakfast alcove, but the grandmother was gone. Her book and pen were still at her place, and when Hood stood near her chair and looked down, he saw the book was a Bible with a crossword puzzle pamphlet inserted between its pages.

  Back in the entertainment room Madeline set down a small TV with a DVD player built in.

  Hood plugged it in, slipped his copy of Dave Boyer’s special into the play slot and sat at the opposite end of the couch from Madeline.

  They watched the first ten minutes in silence. Allison robbed and hammed it up and talked about Joaquin from behind her gem-studded mask.

  “Did you see this last night?” asked Hood.

  “Yes.”

  “Is that Suzanne?”

  “Of course it is.”

  He crossed the room and hit the PAUSE button. His heart was going fast. “Are you going to help me find her or not?”

  “That depends on you.”

  “Maybe you should tell me what’s on your mind, Ms. Jones, because I sure can’t read it.”

  “Sit. Please.”

  Hood hit the PLAY and MUTE buttons on the little TV set then sat down again.

  “How long did it take you to recognize her?” asked Madeline.

  “A few seconds. But I wasn’t sure.”

  “It took me longer than a few seconds. She carries herself differently when she plays this role. The second time I saw video of Allison Murrieta, I knew. My daughter. There she was, with a mask and a wig and a gun.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “I have a cell number for you. It’s all I know.”

  Hood handed her a pen and his notebook, and she wrote down a number from memory then set the notebook and the pen on the couch between them.

  “What’s the deal with Joaquin Murrieta?” he asked.

  “There is no consensus that such a man ever existed, outside of the stories about him. Some historians say he was only legend, a product of Anglo fear. Some say he was a real man. Of those, some claim he was born in Chile, others in Mexico. For every story about him, such as the ones that Suzanne tells on TV, there is a contradictory story about him, too.”

  “She doesn’t have his head in a jar?”

  “No, she does not.” Madeline looked down.

  Hood wondered if the positive identification of a person wearing a mask—even by the suspect’s mother—would be enough to get a warrant for arrest.

  “Why is she doing this?” he asked.

  “Because it’s profitable and exciting. Because it stimulates and arouses. Because it makes the routine of work and family responsibility tolerable. Because she becomes famous and infamous.”

  Hood doubted that Suzanne Jones had sat down in her kitchen one day and asked herself how to make teaching and being a mother more fun, and come up with the idea of armed robbery and grand theft auto.

  “Because she wants to please you?” he asked.

  “How does this please me?”

  “She makes history instead of just teaching it.”

  Madeline looked at one of the soap opera posters, then back at Hood. “Perhaps. Perhaps it’s competition, too. I was a bright star in a small universe. Briefly. I gambled with my ambitions and failed. I saw myself in Suzanne until I saw Allison. Then I knew she’d moved beyond me. Far beyond me. She possesses the courage that I never had and always wanted. I’ll confess to you, Mr. Hood—I’m very proud of her and very sad for her.”

  “You do understand how this is going to end,” said Hood.

  “She’ll almost assuredly be killed.”

  “Someone will.”

  “I doubt that she could pull the trigger of that silly little gun.”

  “There’s nothing silly about a forty-caliber bullet.”

  “Find her, Mr. Hood. Stop her.”

  Hood pocketed his notebook and pen, stood and went to the window. Outside, the breeze was now a wind, and he watched a swirl of dust scratch against the window with the sound of a snake passing over a sheet of paper.

  “I don’t understand,” said Hood. “Of all the people who know Suzanne, and all the people who’ve seen Allison on TV, why hasn’t anyone stepped forward and identified her? She started making the news months ago. Just a little at first, then more and more. Now she’s telling the world about herself. But we haven’t gotten a single call, a single suggestion that we consider Suzanne. Her students, the parents of her students, her coworkers, her friends and acquaintances—what are they seeing? Why did I recognize her in two seconds but they still haven’t?”

  She looked at him with mild surprise. “People are busy and inattentive and absorbed, Mr. Hood. Truly seeing is an inconvenience the mind will avoid. It’s possible you saw her because you’re a good detective. It’s also possible that you saw her because your hearts have touched.”

  After the Hotel Laguna Hood had the same irrational idea, this touching-of-hearts thing, because he wanted Suzanne Jones like he’d never wanted anything or anyone. He barely knew her but was famished to know more. She fired his imagination. He wanted to be great for her. He started slotting her into his future like the last gleaming plank of a ship he’d been building all his life.

  “She denies being Allison,” said Madeline.

  Hood figured she would.

  “When I told her I knew, she laughed at me. She said Allison Murrieta was an attention-starved child and obviously three inches shorter and ten pounds heavier than her. I reminded her that television adds ten pounds to any actor and she reminded me that I was getting old. She said that she’d have me committed if I continued to degenerate at such a rapid pace. She laughed. She finished eating the ice cream from my freezer straight from the tub like she did when she was a girl, then kissed me on the forehead as if I were a child. Like I used to kiss her. Her lips were still cold. Then she sped down the driveway like the bandit she is, the tires of her car smoking.”

  Madeline smiled. It was the first smile he’d seen on her, and he saw Suzanne in it in a way that gave him desire and dread. “As a concession, and because something inside told me to, I admitted to Suzanne that I could be wrong.”

  “But you’re not?”

 
“I am not wrong.”

  “Does Ernest know?”

  “I would find it frightening if he didn’t, but possible. She doesn’t let him be the man in her life because of his high intelligence.”

  Again Hood thought of Lupercio. It wasn’t hard to imagine that Suzanne’s address book could lead him to this place, just as the telephone bill had led Hood to it. It wasn’t hard to imagine what Lupercio would do when he got here. If Marlon petitioned nicely, Bakersfield PD might step up patrol of this area, but that would almost certainly not be enough to deter Lupercio. Hood had a bad feeling about this day and he believed he should act on it.

  “Have you had any calls recently about Suzanne?” he asked.

  “Just yours.”

  “Any vague or unusual calls from a man with a Hispanic accent?”

  “No.”

  “Any unusual visitors or solicitors?”

  “I would have told you immediately.”

  “Can you leave this house? Go stay with someone who doesn’t know Suzanne? You’d need to take your mother. Say five days. Maybe less. Hopefully less.”

  “When?”

  “Right now.”

  “Mary, Mother of Jesus.”

  Madeline left the room and Hood heard voices from the alcove. They spoke in Spanish and Hood caught only some of it. It went from a discussion to an argument back to a discussion. A moment later Madeline was back.

  “I’ll pack.”

  “There’s one more thing.” Hood took out his notebook and pen again. “Every place she might go. Every place she likes. Hotels or resorts she’s mentioned. Vacation spots. Favorite restaurants, bars, clubs. Friends. Relatives.”

  Madeline talked and Hood wrote. It took some time. Later, while she packed, Hood called the first five places on Madeline’s list. No one had seen Suzanne; she was not a recent guest. When Madeline was packed, he put her bags and her mother’s bags into a dark blue Durango.

  Outside the vehicle Madeline took his hands in hers. They were warm and strong. Her eyes were wet and Hood saw the tremble in her chin.

  “Don’t let them kill her, Mr. Hood. That’s really what everyone wants, because that’s how outlaws are supposed to end. And it’s such good entertainment—a real person dying a real death. Maybe she’ll listen to you. Maybe she’ll stop. Maybe she won’t.”

  “I’ll do all I can.”

  “I’m not expecting a promise. I don’t require theater. I used to but now I do not.”

  “Don’t tell her that you told me. Tell her you sent me the wrong way. It might leave us something to work with.”

  “Of course.” She climbed into the SUV and started it up. “Are you going to wait for him here? For this collector?”

  “For a while, yes.”

  Madeline hoisted her purse from the console and produced a house key, which she handed to Hood.

  “Eat the food and drink the coffee.”

  “Thank you. Call here when you get where you’re going. Don’t leave your location on the machine. If you find out where she is—”

  “I know.”

  Hood watched the Durango lumber down the drive then turn toward Bakersfield. In the dusty windblown distance he saw it join a line of traffic. Standing in the heat he dialed Suzanne on the new number and no one answered so he left a message. He said he was just leaving her mother’s house and she was a nice woman but she wouldn’t tell him where Suzanne had gone or much of anything about her. All she’d conceded was this number. He tried Ernest again but Ernest didn’t answer. He got his .25-caliber autoloader, ankle holster and big flashlight from the trunk of his Camaro.

  For a long while he stood leaning against his car, letting the dry, hot wind press against him. It was nice to feel it again. He had loved the Bakersfield wind when he was a kid, sending plastic kites up into it and feeling the string unspool in a steady rush while the kite urgently vanished into the blue brown sky. And he’d loved the Bakersfield wind when he went out riding a borrowed horse with friends along the roads between the cotton farms and the oil fields, the way the wind shivered the white fluffy balls and whistled through the derricks. It was the same wind that blew through Anbar province, but he had few pleasant memories of Iraq with which to associate it. He wondered if Lupercio had ever felt that wind down in El Salvador.

  Hood slung the holster and gun over his shoulder and stepped back into the courtyard. He stopped in front of the fireplace. He touched the big black kettle and confirmed that it was made of plastic. The canna lilies were paper.

  23

  That evening Hood went into the city. He bought food, underwear and shampoo at a Kmart. Then he turned the Bill Woods music down low in the Camaro and drove slowly past the Blackboard and the Corral, where Woods and Owens and Haggard had created the Bakersfield Sound—electric twang, raw and rough, “too country for country” according to the Nashville smoothies.

  This had all happened decades before he was even born. But as a boy Hood had loved the sound of their recordings, and their straightforward tales of prison, drinking, working the rigs, truck driving. To teenaged Charlie Hood the music had seemed truthful and moving—dispatches from a pained world of which he caught glimpses in the Bakersfield all around him. And this is what he heard in it still.

  He swung by his old high school, home of the Drillers, then the house where he’d grown up. The house hadn’t changed much in ten years. The paint was new and the trees were taller and the campaign signs on the bumper of the pickup in the driveway were for Hillary Clinton instead of Bill.

  He was back in Madeline Jones’s home before sunset. He checked the answering machine: Madeline had checked in and that was all.

  At dusk he sat for a while in Suzanne’s room. It appeared to have been abandoned about 1994, Suzanne’s senior year of high school, when Suzanne wasn’t really a graduating girl of eighteen but a mother with a small child and a job in a fast-food place and plans for college so she could teach history. There was a small plastic infant’s bed in one corner. There were teenagers’ clothes and infant clothes still hanging in the closet. How had she managed all that?

  Hood ate his dinner in the darkness of the courtyard, with the fountain turned off and his .38 next to the cat on the chair beside him, waiting for Lupercio.

  An hour later the cat had taken up position on Hood’s lap and he was petting it when he heard a light concussive thud from the desert beyond the driveway.

  Hood froze and listened. It might have been a car door opening, or a gate tapping against its post, or an errant foam food container slapping up against a fence, or some other faint event within the play of wind and silence and the purring of the cat. He knew how far sound could travel in clear, dry desert air.

  Hood picked up his gun, and when the wind died for a moment, he turned his ear toward the desert and listened.

  Opened car doors usually get shut, he thought.

  Silence.

  The cat slipped away when Hood reached over and picked up his flashlight off the floor.

  He stood just inside the entrance to the courtyard, saw the moon low in the west and the glint of the moonlight on the fender of his Camaro and the stars flickering in the canopy of the night like diamonds caught in black mesh, and he thought of Suzanne then dropped her from his mind.

  He followed his flashlight beam across the driveway, boots crunching on the gravel, gun in his right hand. At the fence he stopped and aimed the light into the desert, which easily consumed it but revealed little of itself. Within the limited beam the branches of the sage and creosote shivered white.

  In the middle distance Hood made out the shapes of sand hills. He had chased lizards through such sand hills when he was a boy. On the dunes their tails left long, straight lines and their feet left pointillist claw dots on either side of the lines. Sometimes Hood would follow a track for hundreds of yards, over hill and dune, until it ended at a hole.

  Now in the moonlight the sand hills were pale and dotted with sagebrush, and he remembered that they co
uld be steep-sided and softly packed and treacherous to climb.

  He turned off the flashlight and walked toward the hills. Gradually the sand under his boots hardened into a dirt road. He didn’t like the crunch of the road so he moved off to one side of it, and as he got closer to the sand hills, he saw that they were higher than he had thought. The faint dirt road wound into them and vanished.

  The road comes out of the sand hills, Hood thought, so it probably comes in on the other side of them. But he also remembered the odd incompletion of man-made things in this desert: a section of fence connected to nothing, a foundation slab poured but never framed, a mine abandoned after eight feet of progress, and everywhere fragments of dirt roads connecting nothing to nothing.

  He walked the road between two of the lower sand hills. The moonlight diminished while the shadows deepened, and Hood had trouble clearly seeing the hills ahead. He stumbled in a rut and caught himself but the sound was sudden and loud. He stood for a moment feeling his heart race.

  At the foot of the next hill Hood jumped onto the slope, leaned forward and wide-stepped his way up, sand giving way, gun and flashlight out for balance. Thirteen steps. On top the moonlight was stronger, and he clearly saw the old black Lincoln Continental parked on the road between the hills.

  He swung around as fast as he could, gun first.

  A bad taste rushed into his throat—of hot spoiled antacid pooled on top of fear—the taste of Hamdaniya and Miracle Auto Body and the Valley Center barn.

  But all he saw was darkness and the way he had come and in the near distance the lights of Madeline Jones’s driveway.

  Hood turned back and looked again at the car. Then he crouched and scuttled across the hilltop. From the far side he could look almost straight down on the Lincoln. The windows were darkly smoked and revealed nothing, but through the windshield he could see the glint of moonlight on the dashboard and on the upper circumference of the steering wheel.

  He knelt with the unlit flashlight braced in the sand for balance and let his eyes wander the desert around the car. He thought of the carnage that Lupercio had left behind in the barn, and of the dozen men he’d killed before the most violent gang in L.A. had sued him for peace, and how Lupercio seemed to be prescient and ubiquitous.